The antics and caudillistic temptations of their leader aside, something important and significant is happening at the grassroots level in Venezuela.
Here are some examples, from Venezuela Analysis.
“Farmers, industrial workers, community councils, students, local and national government officials, and international experts converged in an economic forum titled “Local Alternatives to Confront the Crisis of Capitalism” in the rural town of Carora in central Venezuelan state of Lara last week.
The purpose of the conference was to share information and articulate concrete plans for the construction of a de-centralized, non-capitalist economy in the context of the sweeping law-decrees signed by President Hugo Chávez in July, and to display the achievements already made by Carora’s well-developed community council system.
“The forum permits us to advance toward the design of a plan for sustainable endogenous development, based on the 26 law-decrees, and to start to discuss the new forms of property and production proposed in the national development plan,” Mayor Julio Chávez, the main organizer of the event, told Venezuelanalysis.
The forum was set in a rural town, not Caracas, because “we are not concentrating on the center of the country in Caracas, but rather we are advancing this profound transformation of the old state and the old structure precisely so that new actors and new realities emerge to construct another economy,” said Mayor Chávez.
Residents of Carora and the surrounding municipality of Torres organized a constituent assembly to re-write the local constitution after Mayor Chávez was elected in 2004. Now, the Local Public Planning Council (CLPP), a legislative body made up entirely of the region’s 540 community councils, controls 100% of the municipal budget and has become the political arena for local communities to collectively plan their economies.
At the forum Carora displayed the success of its system, along with its plan to overhaul the centuries-old territorial division of the municipality and draw new “communal territories” based on the type of production that is most prevalent in each zone.
In the lead-up to the forum, over 2,000 local producers gathered in working groups with the municipal government to discuss how to improve collaboration between local producers and local government institutions, invest in small-scale cooperative mines, introduce environmentally sustainable practices, accelerate the re-distribution of land, and expand locally controlled energy production and industry.”
“Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez said yesterday that his government would like to introduce local currencies in communities, so as to help their development and to alleviate poverty. Local currencies would allow people to exchange goods and services without needing the national currency to enable such transactions.
Chavez said such currencies “can improve life and above all for the construction of a new social, economic, and political system” by creating an “alternative system of commerce.” Such systems have been applied in many places, according to Chavez, such as “in northern Brazil and in some localities of Mexico.”
Such as system would allow “the poor to possibility of acquiring products via exchange with an intermediary currency that could circulate, for example, in a determinate territory or would have validity for a determinate time,” explained Chavez.
The implementation of local currencies would require a set of rules, said Chavez, which could be passed as a law-decree, under the enabling law, according to which Chavez may pass law-decrees for 18 months, beginning in January of this year. Chavez asked Vice-President Jorge Rodriguez to present a law proposal for this project.”